Fail Up

Posted on May 12, 2011

Fail Up. When you fall, get back up. When you fall hard, rise even higher than you were before. Never let mediocrity be acceptable. Build yourself a great story.

I chose this speech by Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday because even though its about sports, its inspiring to every aspects of our lives. Sometimes, life is about fighting for that inch. Fighting back into the light…climbing out of hell. I like the part where he compares life and football together. Playing football was one of the biggest grinds I have ever been through. I was on the front lines, and every single day I would just beat my body to hell. I would come back to the locker room and my elbows would be purple and their would be cuts and burns everywhere. After games, I remember their just being blood and sweat all over my jersey. There were plenty of times where I went straight into the line of fire without fear, and while I did get hit hard many times, I hit harder a great deal. But while the scrapes and bruises hurt, your also proud of them. You went to battle that day. Why can’t we be proud of the scars and stories we have in life? Is it any different? The game of life is a game of inches. If you are one half second too late or too early you don’t make it. One step to a certain direction you are gone. Everything is up to chance. But are you fighting for it? For your life? Or are you just letting it happen…

I sat down with a friend the other day, and we just started talking about what is going on in our lives. She has the whole world in front of her, but she is absolutely stuck in something that she cannot get out of for at least a couple more months. Life has dealt her an interesting hand through the past few years, and for good reasons, she had to play it safe. I wrote earlier, sometimes in life’s poker game you have to “call” and wait it out to see what happens if you were given crappy cards…well, when your chip’s are bleeding out, you either have to fold or you have to go all in and make a move. While things for her are going to change drastically, they are going to change for the better. There’s nothing she can’t do, but she has been told that she can’t for such a long time that she has believed it. Things will change soon for her, and its going to be unreal to see where she goes.

Its true that when your in something, it seems like the worst thing in the world. You are upset, you cant see the light at the end of the tunnel. People tell you their opinion on what is happening, but they aren’t in the hell. They can’t feel the heat. They can’t feel the pain you are feeling. But they can feel for you. For your pain. Everyones been through something in their life which is the worst thing that has happened to them yet. And while it may not measure up exactly to something that has happened to someone else…its not a competition. Everything is relative.

“Good people are good because they have come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.” – William Saroyan“Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.” – Alan J. Perlis

“You got a dream…You gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.”- Pursuit of HappynessFail Up. Dont let failing burn you to the ground. In all of our workouts for the club we “lift to failure.” The reason why is that how will you ever know how strong you actually are until you can’t life that weight any further? Find your limits, then challenge them. We fail over and over in our lives. We want to take the easy way out and just say “Whats the point?” ….”Why even try anymore?” We are all better than that. We can pick ourselves up from anything. More importantly, the people we love around us can pick us up when we are at our worst. You have to let them though. Not everything in our life has to be done alone. You can ask for help. You can show that you have weaknesses. But it all starts with reaching out. For me, my pain has always given me motivation. My memory brings back these things constantly that motivate me to work harder, try harder, and love more. Thats the way I am. I will always be like that. I always will remember my senior quote, “It’s not about how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” – Rocky BalboaLet your failures bring you up, not tear you down.

E.

"raw. electric. a daily shock to the soul."

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Evan Sanders is a professional life coach, writer, and diehard encourager. He works with people all around the world through his life coaching practice AYKME and has dedicated his life to continuing a journey of personal development and adventure.